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Prairie Night and Chiaroscuro Water Lily — Two Small Quilts for AAQI

I finished quilting Prairie Night and Chiaroscuro Water Lily quite a while ago, but I didn’t get around to binding them or finishing the edges in some way. I wrote about Prairie Night here and about making Chiaroscuro Water Lilyhere. I’ve been working on some other small quilts for Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative, so I figured I’d better get these two finished so I can ship them all off.

Obviously, since I’ve avoided it forever, putting bindings on quilts is not my favorite part of the process. I thought I’d try a couple new options to see if one was easy and resulted in a nice finish. Recently, I’ve added a stiff interfacing (Pellon 72) to my small art quilts to give them some stiffness which makes them hang better. Plus, they look like they’re framed.

For Chiaroscuro Water Lily, after I trimmed the quilt to its final size, I added a piece of the interfacing to its back. I cut the interfacing about 1/4″ smaller than the quilt on each side. Then I put a piece of black felt on the back. Using a satin stitch, I sewed the quilt to the felt, capturing the interfacing in between. Then I trimmed the felt to the final size.

Here’s the result. The finished quilt is 12 inches wide by 9 inches high. The finished result looks good, but I’m not sure how well the felt will hold up. Though, if it’s just hanging on a wall, it should be fine.

For Prairie Night I used the interfacing when I quilted the piece, so it didn’t need more stiffness. I wanted to try fusing strips of fabric folded over the front and back to finish the edges. After trimming the quilt to size, I fused strips to the two short sides (folding the strips in half to cover both front and back) and then trimmed them to length. For the other two sides I mitered the strips at 45 degrees to give the appearance of a mitered binding. After the strips were fused in place, I satin stitched around the inside edges to keep them in place. I was afraid they’d come loose in the corners, so i stitched around the edges about 1/4 inch from the outside.

Here’s Prairie Night. The finished quilt is about 11 inches wide by 8 inches high. This method was pretty quick and results in a nice frame for the quilt.